by Laurel McKee
Aidan studied his friend’s gaunt face and his eyes so full of despair. “I will get the letters back for you, Freddy,” he said gently.
Freddy almost sobbed in relief. “Would you, Aidan? I knew I could count on you. You always have such a way with ladies.”
Aidan nodded. It was time for a trip to the theater.
Chapter Six
During Aidan’s years in the West Indies, he had missed many things. The cool, soft rain of an English springtime. The brandy at his club. The conversation of his friends. But what he had missed most was the theater. Amateur theatricals in someone’s drawing room or a touring company from New York, which was the fare available in the tropics, just wasn’t the same as a real London theater.
He hadn’t been in the Majestic since that night he first met Lily, and it hadn’t changed. He focused his opera glasses on the stage and studied the elaborate gold and crimson velvet curtains, the frescoes above the proscenium that depicted the Muses. Gold boxes rose to either side, as elaborate as wedding cakes with their fashionable inhabitants in black evening suits and bright satin gowns. The excited sound of laughter and conversation hung in the perfume-scented air, along with the flutter of programs and the faint hiss of the gaslights.
There was nothing quite like a night at the theater, Aidan thought as he watched the audience file into the stalls below his box. The anticipation of escaping into another world, of living another life just for a few hours. Those moments just before the curtain rose and a new world was revealed. It was this way every time he went to the theater; it was one of the things that kept drawing him back.
But tonight felt somehow different. Tonight he kept thinking about Lily and wondering if he would see her. Was she behind that curtain? He could picture her there backstage, the very image of cool efficiency as she had been at the Devil’s Fancy, overseeing everything with her brown eyes. Her somber gown and sleek coiffure belying what was hidden inside of her, a fire that had nearly burned him when he dared to touch her. To kiss her.
To want her.
Aidan lowered his glass and frowned as he studied the laughing party in the box across the way. He did want Lily, with a raw passion that had caught him by surprise. It threatened to make him forget everything else but when he could see her again. But he had told Freddy he would find his blasted letters, and for that he needed a cool head.
He turned back to the stage and suddenly noticed a man standing in the shadows of the wings, watching him. Aidan couldn’t make out his features, just the gleam of light-colored hair in the darkness and the intensity of his stare.
Such a glare seemed to speak of anger and brawls, but Aidan couldn’t think of anyone he could have offended so deeply in the short time since he returned from the West Indies. Especially no one in the theater. It was unsettling, and he could feel his muscles tense as if he was prepared to fight.
But then the gaslights flickered, and the audience grew quiet in anticipation of the play beginning. Aidan glanced over to see the curtain sway, and when he turned back, the man in the wings was gone.
Aidan laughed ruefully. He was becoming infected with Freddy’s paranoia, seeing danger where there was none. He needed to focus on his task, not on fighting imagined foes. And definitely not on alluring dark-haired women in gambling clubs…
“What is he doing here, the blighter?”
Lily could hear the barely leashed fury in Dominic’s voice, but she was too busy lacing up one of the actress’s gowns to turn around and look at him. “Who is here?” she murmured. She tied off the ribbons and sent the woman hurrying off to make her entrance. The first night of a play was always frantic; the last thing she needed was one of her brothers in a temper.
But Dominic didn’t seem to be calming down. He paced to the end of the dressing room, the black cloak that was part of his costume swirling around him. “That Aidan Huntington, of course. First he’s at the club and now here at the theater? What’s his game?”
Aidan was here? Against Lily’s will, her heart suddenly pounded, and her mouth went dry. Could he possibly be here to see her? Or was Dominic right and there was some darker purpose to him showing up everywhere so suddenly? Her old distrust of people always seemed to be there, simmering under the surface, but she couldn’t imagine what nefarious reason Aidan could have for being here.
“Oh, Dominic,” she said. She turned her back on his watchful stare and picked up a discarded costume. “He probably just wants to see the play. His mother sometimes comes here, doesn’t she? Why do you suspect everyone of evil motives?”
“Not everyone—just a Huntington. The man just came back to London. Why would he want to hang about here?”
Lily dearly wanted to know that too. Why was he suddenly here, disrupting her peace of mind? Making her think about him far more than she should…
“Shouldn’t you be getting ready for your entrance?” she said, carefully folding the costume. “You’ll be off your game if you worry too much about who is in the audience.”
Dominic gave a humorless laugh. “When have I ever been off my game onstage? But when the play is over…”
Lily spun around to face him, her arms crossed over her chest. “When it’s over, you’ll let him leave. The last thing we need at the beginning of a new season is you causing a scandal fighting a duke’s son. You and Brendan both need to leave him alone.”
Dominic’s eyes narrowed. “What exactly is going on with you and Huntington, Lily?”
“Nothing! I barely know the man. I’m just trying to keep you from getting us all into trouble.” A bell rang in the corridor. “You need to get ready for your entrance.”
Dominic gave a short nod. The door slammed behind him as he left, and Lily slumped down into a chair. Once Dominic had something in his mind, he wouldn’t let it go. She just had to figure out a way to head him off.
But she also couldn’t help but wonder why Aidan was really there. He said he liked the theater and wanted to write plays, which was reason enough, but could there be more?
Chapter Seven
“Anything interesting in the Gazette today, Lily my dear?” Katherine St. Claire asked as she poured more tea into Lily���s breakfast cup.
Lily shook her head as she scanned the tiny newsprint columns and automatically ducked as Brendan tossed a bread roll at their younger brother James’s head. Breakfast in the St. Claire house was always like an immature gentlemen’s club. Brendan and Dominic didn’t live at the St. Claire house any longer, but they always seemed to appear at meal times. “Just that the royal family are leaving for their new residence at Osborne House for the summer, after a trip to Coburg to see the prince consort’s family. Wordsworth attended the Queen’s Ball at Buckingham Palace. The prime minister will—”
“Oh, politics,” Isabel moaned. “Is there anything duller? Especially first thing in the morning.”
“Could you not talk so loudly, please, Issy?” Dominic groaned.
Lily studied him across the table. “You do look rather green this morning, Dominic. Long evening last night?”
Dominic winced. “You could say that.”
Lily tried not to laugh, even when Katherine waved a plate of kippers under his nose and he went completely white.
“You should eat something, dear,” their mother admonished. “It will do you good.”
“Just coffee, thank you, Mama,” he said tightly.
“Serves you right, you wanker, for going out and leaving me here,” James groused.
“Language, James,” Katherine said. “And you are probably too young to go wherever Dominic and Brendan went.”
“Mama, I am almost eighteen!” James protested, but Lily knew how frighteningly adept he had become at sneaking out of the house. He was often gone somewhere where no one else knew.
“Oh, do read the society pages, Lily,” Isabel interrupted her twin, buttering her toast as she cut him off. “I can’t bear to listen to our brothers’ nonsense another second.”
Lily
obligingly turned to the middle of the paper. She, too, could use the distraction of gossip, anything to keep her mind from spinning on one subject—Aidan Huntington.
It had been over a week since that night at the Devil’s Fancy, and she hadn’t yet seen him again. He had sent flowers twice, bouquets of violets, along with short notes in his dark, slashing handwriting, but that was all. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved not to face him after what happened or disappointed. But thoughts of him caught her at the oddest moments. She would be working on accounts and see his teasing smile in her mind, that dimple set so incongruously in his chiseled cheeks. She would be riding in the park and smell his cologne.
And at night, in her dreams, she felt his kiss, his touch. Imagined him between her legs on her bed, drawing her feet over his shoulders as he plunged his talented tongue into her aching womanhood, again and again…
“Lily, whatever are you reading about there?” Isabel suddenly said, yanking Lily out of her heated daydreams. “Your cheeks are all pink. It must be something terribly scandalous.”
Lily jerked her head up to find everyone at the table staring at her. Dominic looked pained, but Brendan’s green eyes were narrowed in suspicion.
“Not at all. It’s merely warm in here this morning,” Lily said carefully. “I was reading an account of Lady Waldegrave’s ball. I doubt she would let anything the least bit scandalous happen in her house.”
“The old battle-ax,” Dominic muttered. “Wonder what she would say if she knew what her nephew was up to at the Devil’s Fancy last night?”
“Dominic, dear, I hope you are not getting into trouble at that club of yours already,” Katherine cried. “Remember what happened last time, with the racetrack.”
Lily sincerely hoped there was not trouble at the Devil’s Fancy, not when they were all working so hard to make it a success. She glared at Dominic across the table, until he groaned and buried his face in his hands.
“Tell me about the ball, Lily, please!” Isabel begged. “Who wore what? Who danced with who? Were any engagements announced? Oh, I do wish we had been invited. I thought we surely would since we saw the Waldegraves at the assembly rooms last month.”
“Issy, you’re much too concerned with the doings of toffee-nosed snobs like the Waldegraves and the Huntingtons,” Brendan said. He snatched Dominic’s kipper from his plate since it would obviously not get eaten there. “Who needs them?”
“I am not concerned about them,” Isabel protested. “I just like gowns and parties. So ignore those philistines, Lily, and read to me about the fashions.”
Lily laughed and bent her head over the paper. “Well, it seems Miss Perkins-Smythe wore white with yellow rosebuds, and Lady Angelina Anderson wore yellow with white rosebuds. The Countess of Salisbury wore a gown of eau de nil velvet and net from Paris, and Miss Chase was clad in pale pink silk with cherry satin trim and a corsage of white velvet roses. And she did become engaged to Lord Hernley, so there you are, Issy—all you could ask for.”
“And what were the arrangements like?” their mother, the consummate hostess and decorator, asked.
Lily read aloud about the potted palms and swags of ferns and white hot-house roses, buffet tables laded with lobster patties and stuffed mushrooms, French wines and pink claret punch. Katherine and Isabel started criticizing the decor, and Lily read farther down the column about some of the other guests as she finished her tea. Many of the names she knew from the Devil’s Fancy or the theater, families who held boxes at the Majestic. And no doubt many of their sons indulged in less respectable pursuits with her brothers, in brothels and music halls and such things.
It always seemed funny to her how the lives of the St. Claires ran parallel to, and sometimes bisected, those of these aristocrats. How they were so intertwined that one could not exist without the other, and yet they were still so vastly far apart. They saw titled aristocrats at the assembly rooms and theater parties and were sometimes even invited to their homes to be shown off as curiosities, but they were never truly friends.
Such as her and Aidan Huntington. Lord Aidan. The gulf between them was wide and dark, lined with jagged rocks and high walls. She could stand on the edge and look across at him, call to him, but she could not cross.
Maybe he knew the chasm as well, and that was why he had not talked to her when he came to the theater.
Then she glimpsed his name toward the bottom of the page, in smudged black print. She closed her eyes and opened them again, sure she was imagining things since her thoughts were so intently on him. But it was still there: Lord Aidan Huntington, younger son of the Duke of Carston—Lily opened the page and read further—was seen dancing with the beauteous Lady HL, daughter of the Earl of D and the diamond of the season. Is a betrothal in the air? Will two of England’s oldest families be momentously united? And will Lord A’s elder brother be next? He has not been seen in London for many a month…
Lady HL. Lily flipped the paper closed and reached for her tea. It had to be Lady Henrietta Lindley. Of course he would be linked with the “diamond” daughter of an earl. She would expect no less. But still the thought stung, the vision of him dancing with a white-clad deb. Kissing her, touching her, telling her all the things he wanted to do with her, as he had with Lily in her office. The chasm didn’t seem so wide between them then.
Her cup clattered in its saucer.
“Lily?” Isabel said. “Was there something disturbing in the paper after all?”
“Not at all,” Lily answered in a strangled voice as she dabbed at the spot of tea on the tablecloth.
“Let me see,” Dominic said, and snatched the paper away from her before she could protest. He flipped through the pages until he came to the one she had been reading.
He scanned the gossip columns until suddenly he scowled, and his eyes became darker than the hungover shadows on his face.
“Lord Aidan Huntington,” Dominic said, and threw the paper back at her. “Does it upset you that he’s practically betrothed, then, Lily? Were his attentions at the club last week not enough? Or when he appeared at the theater?”
“Don’t be stupid, Dominic,” she cried, and threw the paper right back at his head. It bounced off and scattered on the rug. “He was hardly paying me attentions last week, and he did not even talk to me at the theater. I was showing him the club, as he said his cousin was an investor. You would have tossed him out and caused a scene on our first night in business. At least I know how to control myself.”
“Control yourself?” Dominic thundered. “You disappeared with him for an hour!”
“An hour?” Brendan said, his scowl matching Dominic’s. “What were you doing with him, Lily?”
Lily felt her face turn uncomfortably warm, and she turned away to fuss with her napkin as Isabel looked on, wide-eyed, and James smirked. “That’s hardly any of your business, is it? I am a grown woman, a widow. And where did you and that red-haired hussy Louisa Carstairs go off to, Dominic?”
“Damn it all, Lily!” Dominic burst out.
“Language, Dominic,” Katherine said, quelling their argument with the sound of her quiet voice. “I won’t have such talk at my table.”
“Sorry, Mama,” Dominic muttered.
Katherine tapped her fingers on the table and examined Lily thoughtfully. “Aidan Huntington? The son of the Duke of Carston? He was at your club?”
“And being very attentive to Lily,” Dominic said.
“No more than he would have been to any other hostess,” said Lily.
“Was he the one who sent the flowers?” Katherine asked.
“He sent flowers?” Dominic exploded, only to sit back at a look from his mother.
“Violets,” said Isabel. “They were beautiful. Oh, Lily, was it him? Is he as handsome as they say? Did he dance with you at the club?” Isabel cared nothing at all for the past between the St. Claires and the Huntingtons—she was too young and romantic, and too softhearted.
Lily sighed. “Yes, he is good-lo
oking. But handsome is as handsome does, and they also say he is quite the rake. I would be a fool to get involved with him.” She glared at Dominic and Brendan. “Not the least of which because my hotheaded brothers would cause a scandal by dueling with him.”
Isabel rolled her eyes. “I think it sounds romantic.”
“Romantic to let Lily be taken advantage of again? Just as she was with Nichols?” Dominic said.
“I can take care of myself,” Lily answered. “And you have better things to worry about. Don’t you have a rehearsal today?”
“Yes, boys, your father has been at the Majestic for an hour already,” Katherine said. “I think we have exhausted the topic.”
“Shall we go riding in the park today, Lily?” Isabel asked. “I’ve been stuck here at home too long. I need to see people who are not my bossy brothers.”
Lily nodded, still distracted by the quarrel and by Aidan and Lady HL and violet bouquets. “After I finish going over the accounts. I could use the exercise myself.”
“I will go with you,” said James, but Katherine shook her head.
“Your sisters will be fine on their own today,” Katherine said. “I need your help with something later. And, Dominic dear, who exactly is this Louisa Carstairs?”
Lily pressed her hand to her mouth to keep from laughing at the chagrined look on Dominic’s face and quickly made her escape from the breakfast room.
Rotten Row was crowded by the time Lily made her way there with Isabel, the graveled pathways crowded with riders and sleek carriages all jostling for prime space to see and be seen. It was an unseasonably warm day, the sky a pale, sunny blue, and everyone wanted to be outside enjoying the exercise. And the gossip.
Lily guided her horse smoothly into the slow parade, Isabel close behind her. The lane was a tangle of dark riding habits like her own forest-green one, of sleek horses and shining carriages, of lacy parasols and feathered bonnets. She glimpsed the famous courtesan Therese La Paiva from Paris, in her trademark skintight red habit and surrounded by black-coated men, as well as countesses and marchionesses and baronesses.